Honestly, I think that Last.fm is one of the best web portal ever done, on the design side I mean. My appreciation comes partly from some little clever intuitions (e.g. the avatar-button), partly because of its graphic consistency, which never slips into visual bore.
Now I’m wondering if the new Facebook like button, which is spreading webwide pretty fast, will replace the “native “rating” system or if Last.fm’s guys will stuck to the orginal design.

The term, that was firstly brought out in the 70s by perceptual psychologist J. J. Gibson and originally meant “the actionable properties between the world and an actor (a person or animal)”, was introduced with the aforesaid significance by Don Norman‘s besteller The Psychology of Everyday Things (a.k.a POET) and immediately adopted by the design community.

Put in a down-to-earth way, we could say that Threadless scoring system’s affordance is very high since the big squared buttons function is easily and readily understood: the graphic elements stand out, clearly asserting their scope, as if they were screaming out ”hit me!”.

A curiosity: Norman’s book was translated into Italian as The masochist’s percolator, which I know has almost nothing to do with the orginal title, but I think it’s ten thousand times funnier.

The peculiarity of the rating system in Colectiva’s blog, a creative agency based in Guatemala, is that as you move the mouse over the heart icons to vote, they read FRESH. It’s a simple idea that diversifies the design of a component otherwise pretty similar to others.

Reading this Japanese blog that linked us using Google Translate is quite a surreal experience;: apparently Web & patterns matches the description “lead to heart to be the same design, web design collection.” Actually, I wanted to understand what it s the use of the button with their hands applauding. I couldn’t find it.

Nevertheless the clapping hands seem to me an interesting idea for a rating button: if the thumbs-up corresponds to the “I-like-it”, the applause could stand for a extra-strong “I-like-it”.

Mojizu, an online community dedicated to characters design, has a very funny rating system: the site’s logo, designed as a ninja, runs above the numbers following the mouse pointer.
Even the details of the vote have been carefully designed: the logo frozen or burning represent the highest or lowest point of the scale.

The voting system implemented in Behance is simply a thumb up.
If you click on it in the description page, it gives a textual feedback (thank you!) , while in other sections (e.g home page, category listings) indicates also the total score.